The other road—they are in Deradhun in India’s North-Eastern Part near Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve. His brother invites them. The town is surrounded by Himalayas from South and India’s great rivers Yamuna and Ganga from west. In fact the water divide of those holy waters passes through the city. Their group travels in two white Forest Preservation Agency jeeps that her brother-in-law so kindly arranged for them and family.
They are driving on the winding spectacular road climbing up and down the steep gorges sunken in lush vegetation, occasionally showing the grayish, dark brown, rusty colored peaks with the furthest one, that distant dream of climbers cupped with white snow. It glitters from afar as a gem in magnificent royal crown. The road is smooth; the heat rising from tarmac makes the view ahead unclear, void of focus—contributing to the sense of transience liquidity of time and space. Car goes fast enough not to experience the head ache from a such a steep climb, still the eardrums react to the change of altitude, and as turns go around to 360º the head starts spinning. The heat is also a contributing factor, the main culprit.
The sun is set on to melt everything around. It is a high noon, the leaves of saal forest surrounding the road are glistening in the scorching heat, the colonies of monkeys usually lively and active in the evenings are settled under the sparse shade of the threes, their color mimicking that of the dust at the roadside. The monkeys sit in groups and watch the cars passing by idle, immobile, only golden eyes alert and ready to charge after occasional banana thrown to them by a passenger, or just the skin of devoured fruit, still happy to substitute their beetle and crawlers diet for healthy vegetarian one. Their eyes reflect the weariness of hunger and curiosity, it seems they assessing the chance of food thrown at them from each passing car. Mothers are keeping the watchful eye on babies.
The cars now reached the highest point and start to descend. Every mountain and small hill is open to magnificent view, faded pale skies without single cloud, dusted green of forests, metal grey of cliffs in distance, shrilling songs of grasshoppers, and somewhere far down around the other gorge the noise of water, distant, powerful constant noise of falling stream broken into a foam.
The cars climb up the gorge again, steadily approaching the destination. The road narrows. She looks at winding of the road and the dust on its shoulders and the tall, taller than human termite castles, perched some near the saal trees or just at the clearing. Its rent-free inhabitants, big glossy ants, much bigger than their European cousins are busy running errands commuting to and fro from their apartments up the tree smooth trunks and back.
The sound of the motor, hubbub of cicadas and grasshoppers, the heat makes one sleepy while the turns and twists of the road makes the head spin. But she fights off the drowsiness in anticipation of the waterfall—Kempty falls is their destination. The cool freshness of water—pani in Hindi (the word reminds her of etiology of name of her native Georgian city Shorapani)—tskali, in Georgian, and life the water brings to surroundings.
Her thoughts wonder as the road ahead.
The smell of droplets in the hot air some two or more windings downwards of this helix road makes her alert. She feels thirsty and longs for the cold, teeth shattering water from mountain spring—tskaro, she once, long ago drank back home at Pasanauri. She still remembers how numbing the icy tskaros water was, her teeth ache, the mouth gradually getting used to its freezing temperature and heavenly taste of it. Gulp of spring water taken rather licked from the folded palms, numbed by it as well. The taste, freshness, memory of it, clear icy water in one’s palms, put to lips, swallowed, trickling down the throat. Filling another palm fold and drinking, drinking it, killing the thirst for good.
